September 4, 2021

Weekend Reads: A Grant to Electrify US Airports; Amazon's EV Operation Goes Public

It's the weekend! Kick back and catch up with these must-read articles from around the web.

First look: FAA's new grants would electrify airports (Axios) The FAA is announcing $20.4 million in grants to airports for using zero-emissions vehicles and electrifying equipment that currently relies on fossil fuels. Why it matters: While next-wave, future aviation/aircraft tech gets lots of attention, nuts and bolts equipment at airports is decidedly low-tech (think diesel generators and dirty shuttle buses) and ripe for the deployment of existing and mature low-emissions systems. Driving the news: The funding announcement Tuesday, provided first to Axios, is part of $300 million being spent on zero-emissions and electrification projects out of the FAA’s $3.5 billion airport grant program for 2021, an FAA spokesperson told Axios via email.

Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Distributed Wind Power (U.S. Department of Energy) Distributed wind power is used at or near where it is generated, as opposed to wind power from wholesale generation, where power is sent to consumers via transmission lines and substations. Employed by households, schools, farms, industrial facilities, and distributed energy providers, distributed wind doesn’t only refer to small-scale turbines; it includes any size turbine or array of turbines that generates power for local or on-site use.

Keynote Spotlight: Building a Global Renewable Energy Portfolio (Mars) Wednesday, September 08, 2021. 2:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time. Mars Inc. launched its “Sustainable in a Generation” plan in 2017 with an initial $1 billion investment. In this Keynote Spotlight from Smart Energy Decisions’ 2021 Renewable Energy Forum/Summer Edition, Zephyr Taylor, Global Director of Renewable Energy with Mars Inc. provides an update on the company’s ambitious emissions reduction and renewable energy goals and share his experience in building sustainability into Mars’ global portfolio. REGISTER HERE

This powerful tool will help corporates make the switch to 100% renewables (World Economic Forum) Companies in the commercial and industrial sector account for around two-thirds of the world’s demand for electricity. Switching this to renewables can have a transformative impact on the global energy market and will accelerate the global energy transformation that we need to move away from fossil fuel and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Initiatives such as RE100 are a driving force behind this movement and help raise the bar for corporate leadership on renewable electricity; more than 300 companies have set a public goal to source 100% of their global electricity consumption from renewable sources.

California's growing storage fleet is beginning to impact energy markets as envisioned, says grid operator (Utility Dive) The California Independent System Operator (CAISO) is seeing signs of storage resources' ability to shift energy between different times of the day, as the state begins to deploy more and more energy storage systems, a representative for the grid operator said at a regulatory meeting on Monday. "We're seeing the kind of performance from storage resources that very much matches what we've envisioned the storage fleet doing in the past… inter-temporal movement of energy from low-priced hours of the day to high-priced hours of the day," Gabe Murtaugh, CAISO's storage sector manager, said at a regulatory meeting Monday.

Amazon’s favorite electric vehicle company is going public at a very tricky time (Vox Recode) Late last week, Rivian filed for an initial public offering. The 12-year-old electric vehicle manufacturer, which is backed by Amazon and considered one of the biggest threats to Tesla, is seeking a valuation as high as $80 billion. That would make Rivian one of the world’s most valuable automakers, worth billions more than Ford or GM — and its trucks aren’t even on the road yet. Rivian’s first vehicle, a $73,000 pickup, is expected to start shipping in September, and a second model, a $75,500 seven-seat SUV, is supposed to be released next year.

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